Chinatown Detective Agency

Chinatown Detective Agency is an engaging point-and-click adventure with gorgeous art direction that falls just a bit short.

Chinatown Detective Agency is a stylish cyberpunk detective game with a wonderful cast, and it has a cool real-world aspect to puzzle solving. But it does feel a bit like doing homework sometimes.

Chinatown Detective Agency is a title that anyone who loves taking on the role of a gumshoe in a futuristic, pixelated world will enjoy. With clues, ciphers, and other mysteries to solve, this title will make you use your brain and challenge you!

There’s nothing like a good murder mystery, doubly true in video games. The emphasis is on the good and while there are lots of murder mysteries that are good stories, how often do you really find yourself straining your detective brain? Enter Chinatown Detective Agency, a point-and-click adventure game published by Humble. You’ll find memorable characters and a good story, sure, but Chinatown Detective Agency takes the genre somewhere it’s never gone before. Namely, right back into your web browser.

Chinatown Detective Agency tells a pretty typical cyberpunk noir story on a more global scale as you dart across countries looking for clues, leads, and perps. You get a feel for how the world reacts to some of the changes that usually come in a cyberpunk future as opposed to just a city or singular country, as well as how actual history intersects with that. It’s not incredibly deep, but it’s enough to stay interesting as you visit each country and see how it intersects with the larger plot. The voice acting isn’t the greatest, but it’s never annoyingly bad and you get used to it.

Get ready to Google your own clues.

Chinatown Detective Agency is a detective noir point-and-click adventure inspired by Carmen Sandiego. It involves real-world sleuthing that will take you out of the world in order to solve puzzles. It has great art and character designs. It also has good voice acting during most major cutscenes.

I am more conflicted about Chinatown Detective Agency than I have been with a game in a very long time. It’s a mystery story that relies on your own investigation skills, which is an incredibly effective mechanic, and has gorgeous character illustrations and detailed pixel art. I wanted to love it, and I will sing its praises where it’s due. But I was let down in a number of small ways, and while its achievements do much to make up for what it lacks, it can’t reach its full potential as...

Although the game's second half takes a philosophical and somewhat gloomy turn, I found it to be pretty intriguing, even after replaying it three times. While the plot and characters are entertaining and engaging, there is nothing else in Chinatown Detective Agency that seems quite as captivating. Amira Darma's exploits and relatability carry the story to its conclusion, but the way is obstructed needlessly by deleted or bugged voiceovers, confusing puzzle solutions, and an unnecessary money system. Individuals with barely a casual interest in point-and-click detective adventures should probab...

Chinatown Detective Agency is a disappointing miss, that, with just a little more time in the oven, could so easily have been a compelling hit.

One of the biggest reasons I loved becoming an adult was removing the need to do busywork or unnecessary research for things I wasn’t passionate about. Once I got to university, suddenly I was only studying what I wanted to study. If I was curious about a thing, I could look it up at my massive library, use the first high-speed internet that I ever tasted, or ask like-minded individuals around me for answers because it gave a sense of conjoined wisdom and community. So naturally, when a gam...